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Book Reviews

‘The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.’ Alan Bennett

“Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.” ― Franz Kafka

Thursday, 13 December 2012

How to be a Good Wife - Emma Chapman

‘And there it is again, that strange echoing
fear, slipping through the cracks that have formed in the memory.’

This is a haunting debut novel with a
mesmerising voice at its heart.

Marta recounts the events in her days to us and
we question what is real and true. She has been married to Hector, twenty years
her senior, for many years, and their son Kylan is grown-up and lives away from
home now. Marta keenly feels his absence.

Marta’s days are structured, she checks the
time a lot, she goes to the market at a set time. She has no friends, and is
dominated by Hector and by her mother-in-law Matilda. The atmospheric setting
is an unnamed Scandinavian town.

She has stopped taking her medication and finds
that memories are resurfacing of a room, and a girl with blonde hair keeps
appearing before Marta. Who is she, does Marta recognize her, is she from the
past, why does she seem increasingly familiar?

‘Looking over my shoulder, I see myself in
the steamed mirror. I don’t want to push the girl away, to deny these things I
have been seeing. There’s a sense that it would be fruitless anyway: like
trying to sink a cork in a basin full of water. It will always rise to the
surface again.’

Marta begins to doubt the whole basis that her
current life is founded on and her husband Hector seems to then be cast in a
different light.

How to be a Good Wife boasts a gripping narrative with
Marta’s arresting voice. She thinks she recalls images from her past, but are
they real? Is what she remembers the truth, is she paranoid, is it the effect
of having stopped taking her medication?

She doubts herself, her imaginings, and the
reader doubts her too. I totally believed in her, and was scared and anxious as
I read on, riveted.

The feeling of Marta being trapped is utterly
real. Her marriage, her home, the place she lives, it all feels so
claustrophobic.

I wanted to know how this woman’s life could
have been so curtailed, her identity reduced to almost nothing, and why, by
whom – by her own illness and limitations, by the calm yet crippling control of
her husband, by her forgotten past?

This is intelligent fiction, making the reader
think and question everything. Is Marta an unreliable narrator or is everything
she says and thinks true? Can she trust her husband, can she trust her own
senses – the smells she recalls, the sounds she is hearing, the sights that
appear to her.

‘There is something, just out of reach,
which I can feel shifting inside me. I shut my eyes, willing it to come
forward. It’s a smell first, of detergent and sweat, and a rapid image that
shuttles before my eyes too fast for me to grasp….The picture spreads for a
moment like ink through blotting paper, and then just as quickly, it is gone.’

It’s an emotional, edgy experience to read this
book, riddled as it is with uncertainty and deception.

This is an amazing, cleverly written debut by
Emma Chapman; it is compelling, insightful and unsettling – I was hooked throughout and
have been thinking about it a lot; it keeps a hold of you long after you've finished reading.

Reviewed by Lindsay HealyPublished by Picador on 3rd January 2013Reviewed as part of the amazon vine programmeYou can follow the author on twitter @emmajchapman